Five years afterwards he was led in triumph through the streets
of the Italian capital, and, while his conqueror was offering solemn
thanks to the gods on the summit of the Capitol, Vercingetorix
was beheaded at its foot as guilty of high treason against the Roman
nation. As after a day of gloom the sun may perhaps break through
the clouds at its setting, so destiny may bestow on nations
in their decline yet a last great man. Thus Hannibal stands
at the close of the Phoenician history, and Vercingetorix
at the close of the Celtic. They were not able to save the nations
to which they belonged from a foreign yoke, but they spared them
the last remaining disgrace--an inglorious fall.

Vercingetorix,
just like the Carthaginian, was obliged to contend not merely
against the public foe, but also and above all against that anti-national
opposition of wounded egotists and startled cowards, which regularly
accompanies a degenerate civilization; for him too a place
in history is secured, not by his battles and sieges,
but by the fact that he was able to furnish in his own person
a centre and rallying-point to a nation distracted and ruined
by the rivalry of individual interests. And yet there can hardly
be a more marked contrast than between the sober townsman
of the Phoenician mercantile city, whose plans were directed towards
one great object with unchanging energy throughout fifty years,
and the bold prince of the Celtic land, whose mighty deeds and high-
minded self-sacrifice fall within the compass of one brief summer.

The whole ancient world presents no more genuine knight, whether
as regards his essential character or his outward appearance.
But man ought not to be a mere knight, and least of all the statesman.
It was the knight, not the hero, who disdained to escape from Alesia,
when for the nation more depended on him than on a hundred thousand
ordinary brave men. It was the knight, not the hero, who gave
himself up as a sacrifice, when the only thing gained
by that sacrifice was that the nation publicly dishonoured itself
and with equal cowardice and absurdity employed its last breath
in proclaiming that its great historical death-struggle was a crime
against its oppressor. How very different was the conduct
of Hannibal in similar positions! It is impossible to part
from the noble king of the Arverni without a feeling of historical
and human sympathy; but it is a significant trait of the Celtic nation,
that its greatest man was after all merely a knight.